


Panacea

by kat_blue



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Blood and Injury, France gets grumpy when he's injured, Gen, Hospitals, Vague historical setting, War, how do Nations even work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:00:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26229079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kat_blue/pseuds/kat_blue
Summary: Germany is a very young Nation.  In the hospital during one of his earliest wars, he gets an unexpected lesson in Nationhood from an unlikely source.
Kudos: 3





	Panacea

**Author's Note:**

> I'm just trying to be safe with the warnings I don't think it's that bad but I have no metric for acceptable levels of gore.  
> This was 0% researched it's just a headcanon I wanted to play with, don't take this as historically or medically accurate go see a doctor

Francois knows why he’s here, on this sorry cot crouched in front of a gothic church’s altar, waiting for the human nurses to finish up with the men dying to his left and right and above and below. Some Prussian jackass with a rotten sense of humor and a damnably impeccable aim gave him a short snip with a rifle round. It’s still embedded in his thigh, but he could take care of that with a knife; it’s just courtesy that they sent him to wait in the hospital. The Republic of France won’t bleed to death here, and he’ll eventually recover his favorite body part, and he doesn’t really need the nurses’ attention, and he’ll decide if he even wants it depending on how good-looking they are and how badly it hurts when they shove their hands down his trousers.

He knows why he’s here. He just can’t figure out why the other one’s here too.

The young nation of Germany, barely old enough to be called a man, is so wrapped up he looks like a cut of meat coming home from the butcher’s. The one blue eye that’s not covered in gauze is dilated and having trouble focusing on the battleaxe of a nurse trying to stitch him back together, and he’s swaying in his seat like he’s stone drunk. From the extent of his injuries and the way the nurses hover and keep talking to him like he’s a child or an animal, it’s a good bet he shouldn’t be sitting up. He probably shouldn’t be alive.

Francois can’t tell if he’s happy his boys got the little bastard or irritated they didn’t manage to finish him off.

But why doesn’t he heal himself?

Nations aren’t as immortal as they sometimes like to think, and it does take a hot, agonizing few minutes or hours to close up their wounds—a right bitch of a problem if there’s still metal inside—but when they end up in as many pieces as what’s his name, not Louis, not Luther—whatever. _Germany_. When they get battered to scraps and tattered to rags they don’t just wallow in it. Not in the middle of a battle. Not if they plan to keep fighting.

The nurses, as far as Francois can tell, are just as confused. The young man’s conscious, if maybe not entirely with them, but there’s blood on the new bandages just as fast as they can wrap them. They’re giving him enough morphine to kill a man and it’s not even laying him out. They’ve snagged the edge of Nationhood and caught there, unable to advance or retreat.

They don’t get answers. When they do get him to finally stop oozing blood and to lay down, they move on to other groaning men who are not Francois, and Francois decides enough is enough and yanks out his boot knife, shimmies his trousers down, and bites into the wool of one sleeve while he carves out the bullet with his other hand. No one stops him or offers him a shot of brandy or a steady hand to stitch half his groin back together. No one notices another man in pain at all.

France is used to these smaller wounds, the souvenirs picked up in war. They’re likely more troublesome for the humans. But it’s a small task, if painful, for one of their kind, and he does quick work.

Afterwards he takes up useless space in his cot and smokes one of the cigarettes he stole from his own officer. At some point he’ll have to get back to the war, but for now he steals a moment surrounded by dying men who mostly aren’t his and who don’t know or care about him. He smokes, he thinks, he waits.

Even after the cigarette and the human nurses are long gone, Germany hasn’t made any noticeable progress.

It’s to France’s benefit. But it still leaves him stumped.

The ache in his—well, everything north of the knees and south of his belly, frankly—is bad enough he doesn’t feel like walking over, but he calls.

“You, boy,” Francois says in his haughty, perfect Parisian above the din of dying men, “Allemagne. I know you can hear me.”

Sure enough, the other body jolts upright—and veers sideways like a ship run aground, flinching and grasping his belly. He doesn’t answer so much as gasp, “ _Wer_ —“

“Who do you think, idiot child,” France says, refusing to stoop to speaking German. “What are you doing in the hospital?”

Germany, wincing and blinking rapidly, manages to face France from his own bed. The naked shock on his face ruptures into a grimace as he shudders and clutches his guts again, and he doesn’t say a thing.

And people accuse Francois of being dramatic.

When the boy gets a bit of composure he merely stares with his one wide eye. Disbelief. Incredulity. With one arm he gestures as if to show off his entire shroud-wrapped body.

“ _Pah_ —that’s what immortality is for. You should stop wasting all their morphine and free up a bed for a man who needs one.” Francois is well aware he’s still sitting in a bed another man could use. He lights another pilfered cigarette. Germany hasn’t the balls to call him on it.

All Germany does in response to the admonition is give him more of the same concussed look of disbelief.

And suddenly it falls into place. “Did your brother never—“ It’s not possible. Not Prussia, he’d never let something like that slip—but most of them didn’t have older brothers to raise them, most of them figured out immortality themselves. Maybe it never crossed his mind. Maybe he threw his brother into the heat of battle and expected him to learn to run rather than ever teaching him to walk. That did sound in line with Gilbert’s philosophy. “Did your brother never teach you to heal yourself?”

Germany just frowns, brow wrinkling the bandages covering his one eye.

Francois’ emotions slip past contempt and disgust and instead land somewhere near pity.

“You take it from your men—did your brother truly never teach you this? Here,” Francois yanks his trousers down again and rolls his eyes when Germany shrieks _I am not interested in that_ , “Like this.”

He stretches out his hand, almost as if to grab Germany, and feels for the nearest French soldier. There's no benefit to reaching out physically, but Germany needs a visual. He’s an amateur at this, after all.

Somewhere on the other side of the hall, there’s a few injured Frenchmen he can sense. One is in very poor condition, one is barely conscious, one is sitting upright and smoking—Francois gets a visual on him, gestures to Germany to watch.

France flexes out his fingers, getting a feeling of the energy in the room, and Germany’s eye narrows with focus. Then, like wrapping loose threads around his hand, France rips the power towards himself.

The French soldier on his deathbed shudders and goes still, and the wound on France’s leg seals with almost no scab or scar.

“You…you _killed_ him,” Germany whispers, eye gone wide. “One of your own men…”

“He was dying,” France corrects, “and his country needed him in one way or another. He was never going to return to the battlefield or to home. It doesn’t have to be deadly, I could’ve taken it from one of the others—but they are healing and will most likely be able to keep serving.”

Germany was already pale, but now he looks septic.

Francois scoffs. “We take; that’s how we survive. That’s _always_ how we’ve survived. Your people are your power, you little fool—or are you so used to falling apart you can’t even tell who your people are?”

If Germany were Prussia, even all those unhealed injuries wouldn’t keep him in bed in the face of an insult like that. But the boy just glares at him…and then his gaze turns away, and it’s as if France can see the gears meshing and beginning to spin in his head.

“You kill them to keep yourself alive,” he says softly, still incredulously. “I don’t understand how you kill your own men…”

“You use your people to keep your nation alive. They rely on you, you rely on them. You’re all the same thing, really,” France says, and the thought strikes him with a certain poetic sensibility now that he’s not in inconvenient pain. “You’ve simply got to shift the power to where it’s needed most.”

“It’s most needed to heal your—“

“I demonstrated, for you, since apparently your brother couldn’t be bothered to care,” says France with the last of his patience, wrenching up his trousers. “You Germans really irritate me sometimes, you know that?”

“That’s obvious,” says Germany, which really just proved his point. “But—why?”

“’Why’ what, you German rat?”

“Why show me?” Germany lays back down, but that one blue eye keeps ahold of Francois like a lifeline. “It’d serve you better if I just…fell apart.”

It’s true, and Francois is disgusted with himself for the sympathy he feels for a piecemeal little Nation made of rabble rousers and artless ruffians, but he’s never been entirely heartless. Even when it would serve him better. “Because I can’t stand to see such a pathetic mess. You’re a Nation; act like one.”

Germany’s lips press thin. “You sound like Herr Preußen.”

“ _Never_ compare me to that man again.” With one last jerk of his uniform to straighten the shoulders, France finally draws himself off the bed he’d commandeered and turns away from the boy—not fully turning his back on him, just in case the little idiot really had been playing ill the whole time and tried to jump up with a knife, or some other bone-headed assassination attempt—and stalks out of the makeshift hospital. His commanders are somewhere to the southwest of here, he can sense them; maybe they’ve made progress while he took his break. Unlikely, but indefatigable hope was so aesthetically romantic.

More likely, the German troops would be feeling haggard and run-down while their little Nation still struggled to pull himself together; now would be a good time for a strike. Maybe a coup de grace that would finish off the boy without even touching him; maybe a good routing so that he’d get his feet underneath him just in time to run back home to Bavaria or wherever it was Gilbert kept him cooped up.

Back before the altar of the gothic church, Ludwig closes his eyes and waits for the world to stop spinning around his head. In somewhere like his heart, he can feel the hum of dozens of other hearts—maybe hundreds, maybe thousands—and a pull like a magnet’s towards dozens or hundreds or _thousands_ of other cots around him. German soldiers. He knows his people, no matter what they say. And he knows when his own men are dying around him, their ragged breath and stuttering heartbeats so close his own body struggles to breathe and keep his own heart beating. War means killing, eating means killing, but he’s never considered killing his own men for his own sake. It runs counter to everything he knows about being a Nation. Herr Preußen has drilled it into him about _unity_ and _majority_ and keeping himself alive and—

And clearly his lessons came up short. The throbbing pain all throughout Germany’s body attests to that.

Ludwig reaches out, tentatively, mostly in his mind, and isn’t quite sure whether he’s imagining the feeling of energy gathering around him, drawn like iron filings to a lodestone. For a moment it all seems rather foolish, it must be some feverish hallucination; there’s nothing scientific about this no matter the magnetism or galvanism or anything else.

Then he drags it towards himself, like ripping giblets out of a field-dressed animal.

A dozen—a hundred—a thousand—uncountable sighs go up.

Within minutes he can unwind the bandages, his skin smooth and unbruised. No gashes, no bullet wounds. No broken ribs or hemorrhaging. It’s better than morphine’s painlessness. Quickly he walks out of there, not looking back, feeling stronger than he has as far as he can remember and terrified of seeing the damage he’s wrought.

Someday, with practice, perhaps he’ll be so used to it he’ll do it without a thought.

**Author's Note:**

> The reason Prussia never mentioned this is because 1. He’s got a high enough pain threshold he never bothers speed-healing his small wounds & would consider anyone else who does to be a selfish, weak person and 2. When it comes to big wounds he does it instinctively. No one had to explain how to take energy from his people or flow it around, he figured it out without even having to think about it. But Germany has always been more fragile and prone to falling apart, he’s not used to pulling himself together, and he relies too heavily on orders from people he thinks know better.


End file.
